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LOS ANGELES, Feb. 3 (UPI) -- Moonfall is Roland Emmerich's masterpiece. The Hollywood expert at destroying the world has incorporated his greatest hits, but also made it his ultimate disaster. In 2011, Endeavor astronauts Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) lost a crew member when debris from the moon dislodged him from the tether. NASA blamed solar flares and human error, and dismissed Harper for insisting he saw something else. Fowler got promoted.
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In the present, janitor K.C. Houseman (John Bradley) uses a University of California-Irvine professor's office to do his own moon conspiracy research. He discovers the moon is out of orbit and leaks it to social media, forcing NASA to respond. Boy, it's going to be sweet when they have to call on good old Harper to help them out.
Emmerich powers through all the plot and character setups of Moonfall much faster than Independence Day. His pace has hastened in recent years since 2012.
We meet Harper's ex (Carolina Bartczak) and her new husband (Michael Pena). Harper's teenage son, Sonny (Charlie Plummer), is arrested for reckless driving with substances found in the vehicle. Meanwhile, Fowler's ex (Eme Ikwuakor) neglects their son for government work.
Character development gets short shrift as Moonfall races to its set pieces, but those always were the parts that slowed down The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, anyway. It's not like Emmerich's spectacle disaster movies ever offered more than broad strokes, so better to get on with it. Moonfall gets to the space mission much faster than Don't Look Up did, too.
The film's utter conviction at the most outrageous claims is what makes Moonfall magnificent. Harper is the cool hero in his disheveled rebel way. Even though she played the game to advance in NASA, Fowler speaks up for the American people when they want to minimize the projected threat.
The actors commit to the sort of earnest dialogue and family drama that Team America: World Police would mock, but these movies don't work if they're cynical. Subtlety is most definitely not on the menu.
And Moonfall really piles it on. Harper even plays hard to get when Fowler offers him the mission to the moon, as if he has anything else to worry about if the moon crashes into the Earth. Houseman's nervous confessions before he gets the chance to hero up are next level.
It only takes a week for the entire world to descend into looting anarchy. Natural disasters that impact the world add many more earthbound disaster set pieces to Moonfall.
They have to drive a space shuttle down a looted street to get it to the launchpad. The families on the ground still have to face obstacles to get to safety and wait for Harper and Fowler to complete their mission, too.
The science is as loose as it is in even non-Emmerich films like Armageddon. In the asteroid movie, the astronauts slingshot around the moon to land on the asteroid. Moonfall has its own version of that to get Fowler and Harper with limited time and resources. There's even a deus ex machina bigger than the computer virus in Independence Day.
Moonfall delivers exactly what it promises, and more. You will see astronauts fight the moon and citizens attempt to survive calamities on Earth. Along the way, Moonfall treats the viewer to some of the genre's most outrageous moments.
Moonfall premieres in theaters Friday.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
